.
To recap: we’re fucked.
He’s got a face like a baby’s arm.
He’s an off-key out of kilter
Campervan Combover Beethoven.
I keep thinking of “Idiot Wind” and when I do
I forget to breathe too,
Like the moment Michael Myers
Manifests out of the dark
Nowheres of the Imagination.
Overheard:
“Did you have any dreams?”
“I had two dreams about being sexually assaulted by men.”
This really happened. Life’s bad enough
Without making up more of it.
But you know all this.
Today isn’t like other days. My phone’s
Smashed up too. I’ve dropped that phone
In porcelain lobster pots
Before, and shower stalls,
Clattering on concrete floors and hurled
The bugger off bridges
And never a scratch
But today’s different
And now when I look at you
It’s through cataracts of cracks and noone
Ever said love is blind, did they?
So that’s good. Then when I get home
The curtains are on fire;
The sinks are spilling out
With body parts. Scratching my chin
With someone else’s elbow
I lose an hour trying
To keep my tongue in my cheek
Until I get a pain in someone else’s neck.
But now’s not the time for tears, is it.
When there’s all them cherries to pick
And big ideas to think
Like Liberty
And the Meaning of the Blues.
The world isn’t really gonna end
But in dog years we’ve had our day.
I really tried. I thought
It would work. I wanted so much
For it to work and us.
Why deny each other this, the lost solace
Of smashing together our junk and tumbling
To the floor in an avalanche of blankets
And discarded belts. What’s really up
Is we deny ourselves
What we want, which is what,
When you curtsey in your pin stilettos
Pausing to jam the heels into my eyeballs,
Blood streaming all over the Lily of the Valley
And your hips burning into my brain
And my eyes empty like desert wells:
We nearly made it. Fall my tears.
And now I’m sat on the bare grass
In a marquee, in a tuxedo
With a martini in my hand.
The band’s playing but there’s no guests
And the floor keeps moving
Every time I try to pass out on it.
I love you
More than my heart can bear and break.
We’re idiots; we should start a school,
Enjoy a coffee and a chinwag
At ten forty-five
Every single day
Til one of us dies.
In the sequel
We look down at the shadow on the grass
Where the body walked off
Setting up a whole damn franchise.
There will be no sequel. To recap,
We’re fucked.
Twenty sixteen has killed us
But itself refuses to die.
If we ever get married babe
None of this is going in the speech.
If life is sharing a milkshake with you
We drink through separate straws.
People often ask me why
I talk about you all the time
And I always give the same answer.
AJ Dehany